The popularisation of Interracial Teen Romance in Contemporary Hollywood Cinema. "Save the Last Dance" (Thomas Carter, 2001)

Abstract

In the first years of the present decade US theatres premiered several features which focused on the formation and progressive evolution of mixed race couples. One of them -Save The Last Dance- places an interracial relationship at the very centre of the its narrative, this time transferring the complexities of racism and racial conflict to the world of teenagers, high school and hip hop music. The film has to be located within the threshold those productions made for a crossover black and white audience -with the presence of a white heroine and the reliance on African American thematic. Nevertheless and, perhaps in an effort to encompass an audience as multicultural and wide as possible, Save The Last Dance gives in to discriminatory practices which somehow question the film's all-embracing policy and utopian ending. As this paper seeks to demonstrate, this procedure will necessarily affect not only the construction of the interracial couple but al so the way blackness is popularised, almost exclusively, for the sake of a white spectator.